Q. and A. on ISIS Hostages Held in Syria

Nearly two dozen Western hostages held together in a 215-square-foot cell in Syria made a chess set from discarded pieces of paper.CreditCreditGlenna Gordon for The New York Times

By The New York Times

Oct. 31, 2014

The New York Times published a detailed account earlier this week of the horror 23 Western hostages faced when they were held by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, in an underground network of prisons in Syria. Invited to ask questions of the reporter, Rukmini Callimachi, in the comments of the article, readers addressed a variety of topics, including countries’ policies toward paying ransoms, the Islamic State’s finances and how to help the remaining hostages. Ms. Callimachi responded to a selection of the questions.

Why hasn’t the United States penalized countries that pay ransoms?

Q.Why haven’t France, Italy and other European countries suffered either embargo or boycott for their clear economic support of terrorists? We put individuals in jail in U.S. for sending money to the wrong charities. And now that these terrorists are strong and emboldened by the millions of euros they’ve collected, why are we cleaning up the mess for free?

U.S. officials have told me that they have leaned on the Europeans privately in meetings held behind closed doors. The general sense I got from speaking to the relevant authorities is that the United States needs its allies for more important things — for example, to show a united front in combating ISIS, or in order to set a common agenda in dealing with the conflict in Ukraine. They explained to me that ransom-paying has not — as of yet — escalated to a level where they would want to be public in their criticism. What you will notice is that former administration officials will often break their silence once they leave public office. One example is Vicki Huddleston, the former American ambassador to Mali, the country where Al Qaeda’s kidnapping-for-ransom business began. See her particularly strident comments in my story from July:

“The Europeans have a lot to answer for,” said Vicki Huddleston, the former United States deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs, who was the ambassador to Mali in 2003 when Germany paid the first ransom. “It’s a completely two-faced policy. They pay ransoms and then deny any was paid.” She added, “The danger of this is not just that it grows the terrorist movement, but it makes all of our citizens vulnerable.”

Hasn’t the U.S. negotiated for prisoners of war?

Q.“The U.S. government doesn’t negotiate for hostages” — but didn’t we negotiate for the release of a traitor by giving the enemy five high-profile terrorists?

The release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in return for five Taliban detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has been the subject of enormous frustration for the families of the ISIS hostages. Once Sergeant Bergdhal was released, it became even harder for the families to negotiate on behalf of their loved ones — because ISIS was asking at one point for the release of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, an M.I.T.-trained Pakistani neuroscientist currently incarcerated in Texas.

The U.S. government has argued that Sergeant Bergdahl was in a different category than the ISIS hostages because he was a prisoner of war, and there are international treaties governing P.O.W.s. In normal warfare, nation-states are allowed to exchange prisoners. Critics have pointed out that this only applies to nation-states, and that the Taliban are hardly a legitimate government. They also point to the fact that U.S. law forbids making concessions to a terrorist group. The administration has countered by saying that the Taliban over all — unlike ISIS — has not been designated a terrorist group.

Of course, these distinctions are purely rhetorical for people like Diane and John Foley, who saw their son James beheaded on TV.

How does ISIS use its money?

Q.Follow the money. What did they use the money for? They appear to have gotten many millions. It shouldn’t be that easy to move and spend the kind of money paid to them without gaining notice. Once you find their bankers, then you’ve got them and their support network and you can hopefully isolate, identify, and kill them.

A. Hello, Mark, and thank you for your comments. I am hoping to start working on tracking the money next. David S. Cohen, the treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, recently said in a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that ISIS had netted at least $20 million in ransom payoffs this year. He said that even though the group had been blacklisted from the world’s financial system, there is evidence to suggest that ISIS may still be using banks inside Syria and Iraq.

I know that in the case of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Al Qaeda’s branch in northern Africa, the millions of euros that it netted in ransom money was hidden in what one source jokingly called its “desert bank.” Basically they would dig holes in the dunes and stash the money inside, rolled up in layers of plastic. They noted down the GPS coordinates of the hole and returned to the spot when they needed “to cash a check,” if you will. I wrote about this in July.

Until Mr. Cohen’s recent statements, I assumed that ISIS was also holding its money outside the financial system, perhaps in safes inside the various buildings they control. If they are using local banks, that would create another dimension of sophistication.

Why do journalists put themselves in such danger?

Q.Why do these journalists continue to travel to the Middle East? It is clearly a risk to go. Not for all of the humanity in the world would I travel where I know my life is of zero value.

Journalists travel to war zones because it is our duty to bear witness and to report on world events.

Because of what has happened to James Foley and the others, major news organizations including The New York Times have pulled back from traveling into the rebel and insurgent held areas of Syria. This pullout has meant that there is little objective, on-the-ground reporting that is coming out of the Syrian civil war right now.

How can we help?

Q.This is a heartbreaking article. What can we do to save those remaining? A crowdfunding campaign? While I understand the negative implications of our government paying, what about us citizens?

The families of the American hostages have tried to raise money privately. This has been anything but easy. Diane Foley, the mother of the slain journalist, described to me the agonizing task of having to ask for donations. It was humiliating and frightening. In an effort to save her son’s life, she was essentially passing around a hat asking people to donate money, which they knew would go into the coffers of one of the world’s most brutal terrorist groups.

Of the 15 hostages that were released from ISIS captivity, the majority were freed after their governments paid their ransoms through a network of intermediaries. The one exception is the ransom paid to free Daniel Rye Ottosen, a 25-year-old photojournalist from Copenhagen. Mr. Ottosen is a former athlete, and his family and friends bonded together to raise the sizable ransom, organizing to deliver it to the captors when the Danish government refused to intervene.

The Foley family is in the process of creating a legacy fund and resource center, which aims to help other families in the same predicament as them. You can reach them through freejamesfoley.org.

What impact does the American policy have on ISIS?

Q.The NYT has reported that the U.S. government claims that ISIS is getting a couple million dollars each day from oil, extortion, taxes, plus what they get by taking banks and government sites.

What real difference would one or two ransoms have made to events on the ground? None, except to save these hostages.

Does anyone imagine that ISIS will now forgo taking any American hostages because we didn’t pay? Does anyone imagine they are short of money, that one ransom would have made a difference?

You are correct in stating that ISIS makes most of its money from the war economy they control, including as much as $1 million per day in oil revenue. What we know is that there were 23 Western hostages, and that at least 15 were released for ransom. I don’t know the exact number that was paid to free each one, but former hostages say that the ransoms were, on average, 2 million euros per person. This of course means that some were more and some were less, but let’s just take this estimate at face value and assume that each hostage paid 2 million euros, or approximately $2.5 million, to be freed. That would mean that ISIS has netted around 30 million euros so far from ransoms for hostages they held for up to 13 months.

This pales in comparison to the oil revenue, which at $1 million per day would mean that the group is making $30 million in a single month.

Families of the American hostages have been critical of the government’s decision not to pay, and some people sympathize, particularly when the outcome for people like James Foley and Steven Sotloff was a horrific death.

The United States maintains, though, that the no-concession policy protects Americans in the long run by reducing their value in the minds of potential kidnappers. Before setting to work on the story of the ISIS hostages, I spent several months researching how Europe has unwittingly become Al Qaeda’s main financier through the multimillion-dollar ransoms they have paid to free their citizens. For that story, I identified 54 kidnapping cases carried out by Al Qaeda’s direct affiliates in Africa, Yemen, Syria and beyond. Of these 54 cases, only four were Americans, representing just 7 percent of the total. By contrast almost one-third were French nationals.

I cannot say for sure if terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are avoiding kidnapping Americans. But the numbers suggest that they are targeting nationals of countries that are known to pay ransoms.

What role does Saudi Arabia play?

Q.Several people correctly concluded that Saudi Arabia is the source of funding of ISIL. Why is our government referring to them as an ally? We don’t need their oil anymore. We can openly point at them for 9/11 for using 19 of their citizens to murder some 3,000 U.S. citizens.

Why can’t we call a spade a spade?

Let that whole region rot with those bushy bearded criminals biting the hand that feeds them.

I don’t have any evidence that Saudi Arabia is financing ISIS. All of the information we have suggests that ISIS, unlike other terrorist groups, is largely self-financed through the war economy they control. For example, they have seized oil fields in Syria as well as in Iraq, and the United States Department of Treasury now estimates that they are making as much as $1 million per day from the oil they sell. They also control other aspects of the economy like grain silos and wheat production. See this excellent Reuters story about how they are taxing wheat farmers in Iraq following the push on Mosul. Unlike Al Qaeda in its early days, when it relied heavily on deep-pocketed donors from the Gulf, ISIS has a remarkable level of financial autonomy. This is also what makes it so dangerous: There are no countries that the United States and others can lean on to try to pressure ISIS. Even the Taliban were willing to enter into indirect negotiations with the United States through the intermediary of Qatar.

So far, no such intermediary has emerged for dealing with ISIS.

What about other Arab countries?

Q. Where are the Saudis? And the rest of the Arab/Muslim nations? From what I understand ISIS/ISIL mistreats/tortures/kills/maims nearly everyone they can mistreat. It’s a war that needs to be fought IMO (in my opinion) by people living adjacent to this region, whose own citizens may well be tortured by these groups, not by the USA.